Category Archives: War and Peace

“When thy intelligence shall cross beyond the whirl of delusion, then shalt thou become indifferent to Scripture heard or that which thou hast yet to hear.” – Bhagavadgita

I keep this passage from the Book of Doctrines close to my heart since I first came across it in the winter of 1991, for I thought it a dangerous passage. Two centuries prior to our beloved Christian movement and some seven to twelve hundred years after Moses first freed the Jews from slavery in Egypt, the Gita was making doctrines obsolete faster than scribes could record them. Or the rich people of those days could typeset, print and distribute them. The ebb of life on the planet was slow and uneven in the third century BCE or we might all be walking about with dots on our foreheads.

Ten years ago, photos of the crucifixion — and worse — were released to the American public. The media still call it “the Abu Ghraib scandal,” as though, oops, the awkward repercussions for Team Bush were the torture photos’ primary horror.

No one talks about “the Auschwitz scandal.” The depth of our moral wrong has yet to be plumbed.

Ten years later . . . the hooded man with arms outstretched, electrodes attached to his fingers, revisits the national conscience. Iraq is in a shambles. The prison itself was closed in mid-April because Sunni insurgents are too much of a threat in the region. We wrecked and contaminated two countries in reckless pursuit of revenge and national interest.

‘What is certain is that Barack Obama’s rapacious coup in Ukraine has ignited a civil war and Vladimir Putin is being lured into a trap.’ Photograph: Anatoliy Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images

I watched Dr Strangelove the other day. I have seen it perhaps a dozen times; it makes sense of senseless news. When Major TJ “King” Kong goes “toe to toe with the Rooskies” and flies his rogue B52 nuclear bomber to a target in Russia, it’s left to General “Buck” Turgidson to reassure the president. Strike first, says the general, and “you got no more than 10-20 million killed, tops”. President Merkin Muffley: “I will not go down in history as the greatest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler.” General Turgidson: “Perhaps it might be better, Mr President, if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books.”

The genius of Stanley Kubrick’s film is that it accurately represents the cold war’s lunacy and dangers. Most of the characters are based on real people and real maniacs. There is no equivalent to Strangelove today because popular culture is directed almost entirely at our interior lives, as if identity is the moral zeitgeist and true satire is redundant, yet the dangers are the same. The nuclear clock has remained at five minutes to midnight; the same false flags are hoisted above the same targets by the same “invisible government”, as Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations, described modern propaganda.

Under 30 minutes, deceptions 2is Chris Pratt’s follow-up to his popular full-length documentary from 2010 (reviewed here). D2 focuses on the use of public relations firms to manipulate the public into supporting foreign wars of aggression.

But these aren’t ordinary wars, where industry sends armies into the bush to slaughter natives to seize their lands. Instead, now the US and its allies are poisoning the lands they invade, using depleted uranium and caustic chemicals, and generating an epidemic of birth defects.

There is an ongoing and deliberate attempt by foreign powers to spearhead the destabilization of Ukraine including its state structure. There is a long history of colored revolutions in Ukraine going back to the 1990s.

The protest movement in Kiev bears a marked resemblance to the “Orange Revolution” of 2004 which was supported covertly by Washington. The 2004 “Orange Revolution” led to the ousting of the pro-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, spearheading into power the Western proxy government of President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Julia Tymoshenko.

Iraq vet Ross Caputi’s film opens with a fleeting synopsis of the American heartbreak — and the bandage we tape across it.

His documentary, Fear Not the Path of Truth, is about the U.S. devastation of Fallujah, in which he participated as part of Operation Phantom Fury in November 2004, but the first couple minutes give us an overview of his hometown, the “former industrial city” of Fitchburg, Mass.:Continue reading →

I’ve put this off long enough. I’ve enjoyed the fruits and sweetness of a brief entanglement with bliss and despair long enough. It is time that I get down to business, call a spade a spade and then pick up my spade and put it to its intended use. I am done with my creature comforts and of protecting what has yet to be taken, as if what has already been taken has not been egregious enough.

Perhaps I should qualify the comforts I enjoy today, at the edge of this springboard, by mentioning where this journey began for me. Continue reading →

The people of the United States were subject to a deliberate deception by the Obama administration concerning the use of chemical weapons in Damascus, Syria on August 21 according to leading investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh. No stranger to big stories, Hersh has a successful track record of books and articles based on sources deep in the United States intelligence community.

Haiti and Syria are victims of their rescuers. The two nations are now sites of major disease outbreaks. Cholera in Haiti and polio in Syria didn’t just happen. Through negligence, those who claim to rescue the people imported the disease entities and fostered the conditions for wider outbreaks.

Poison gas is not only a “moral obscenity” — one the United States stockpiled for decades after its use was banned in warfare — but a metaphor for human recklessness and wasted science.

Like it or not, we’re forced to think about it these days, since it’s still an enticing pretext for war. And the more I think about it, the more I marvel at the persistent insanity of its existence. The “red line” that the so-called civilized world crossed over a century ago was not in the use of poison gas but in its creation, because it’s lethal whether it’s used or not. Attempting to get rid of it — by burying it, burning it, dumping it — has consequences almost as deadly as firing it off in battle.

In 2011 when Muhammar Qaddafi refused to leave quietly as ruler of Libya, the Obama Administration, hiding behind the skirts of the French, launched a ferocious bombing campaign and a “No Fly” zone over the country to aid the so-called fighters for democracy.

The US lied to Russia and China with help of the (US-friendly) Gulf Cooperation Council about the Security Council Resolution on Libya and used it to illegally justify the war. The doctrine, “responsibility to protect” was used instead, the same doctrine Obama wants to use in Syria. It’s useful top look at Libya two years after the NATO humanitarian intervention.

As we commemorate the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, 12 former CIA, FBI, NSA, and US military officials — including Time Magazine’s 2002 person of the year, Colleen Rowley, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who provided the daily brief for three presidents — say in an open letter to President Obama that the charge that President Assad used chemical weapons on August 21st is based on false intelligence.

If this charge is false, and leads to war in Syria, it would not be the first time US leaders have misled their public into going to war. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, admitted in 2003 that America went to war in Vietnam on the false intelligence that North Vietnam had attacked a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.

“Because these weapons can kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant, the civilized world has spent a century working to ban them.”

Why does the president need to address a classroom full of third-graders?

On Tuesday night — hallelujah — he stepped back from the brink of war, but in his address to the nation he spent most of his time justifying his earlier aggression toward Syria, detailing the Assad government’s single, heinous deviation from the civilized norms of war.

President Barack Obama spoke as if his political future was on the line Wednesday evening during his address to the nation on the Syria crisis. He went through the horrors of the Syrian civil war, blamed the Syrian government for the August 21 chemical weapons attack, and provided verifiable (but, as yet, unverified) statements of fact concerning his certainty that the Syrian government initiated the chemical weapons attack. (Full speech)

“The European race’s last three hundred years of evolutionary progress have all come down to nothing but four words: selfishness, slaughter, shamelessness and corruption.”

It only took the rest of the world 300 years to catch on to the evil that masquerades as “western civilization,” or perhaps it only took the rise of new powers with the confidence to state the obvious. Anyone doubtful of America’s responsibility for the evil needs to read The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.

Leaders of the Democratic Party and their media side kicks are giving President Barack Obama a free ride on his proposal to attack Syria. Along with the Republican leadership, they’re ignoring the strong opposition to any attack by citizens in both parties and independents.

The president’s proposed military strike targets a government that has neither attacked nor threatened to attack us or our allies. Obama did so without any intent to get congressional approval and before any evidence was made public. He and the Secretary of State announced the attack without regard to clear international law which bars the unprovoked attacks on sovereign nations.

This is the time, as the next war strains to be born, amid the same old lies as last time, amid the same urgency and pseudo-debate and pretensions of seriousness:

The government of Syria has crossed a “red line.” It has used poison gas, killing hundreds of innocent people and committing a heinous war crime. And suddenly, clear as a bell, we have good vs. evil. Our only course of action, President Obama and his spokespersons tell us, is to “carry out a punitive strike against the Syrian government.”

The number of starving US citizens during Obama’s terms in office is a whopping one in seven, worse than the global average of one in eight. As he continues to pour several hundred billion dollars into the Middle East war theater that will likely soon include Syria, Congress wants to cut $40 billion in food aid to its constituents.

At its core, the ongoing military trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the admitted conveyer of three-quarters of a million classified U.S. government documents to Wikileaks, is about the evolution of big data into a relentless and almost certainly unstoppable social force. Pfc. Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst arrested in May 2010 and charged with 22 offenses involving the passing of information to Wikileaks, is seen by many as a whistleblower whose actions revealed mendacious covert actions of the U.S. government in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and elsewhere.